The pronoun što and its semantic and syntactic derivatives in the vernacular of the Sirinić county

Abstract

This paper analyzes the pronoun što and its semantic and syntactic derivatives in the Prizren - South Morava dialect in the Sirinić county (Sirinićka Župa), in the northern part of the Šar Mountains. The paper focuses primarily on the syntactic use of što, while its semantic derivatives are outlined mainly in terms of references to the previous research on the subject. The dialect corpus shows that this lexeme has a wide range of syntactic realizations - it can be used as a relativizer in defining and non-defining relative clauses, as a conjunction in the clauses of reason and declarative clauses, and it can also be used as a pronoun and adverb. Moreover, the research includes the cases in which što was found to be a part of multi-word conjunctions in hypotactic or paratactic structures. This paper primarily aims to determine and examine the syntactic positions in which što is realized and the environment in which it is used. In the majority of the observed cases, there were also other corresponding syntactic devices, so that the focus was also placed on determining the frequency of the lexeme što in these positions in relation to its synonymous syntactic counterparts. The fact that the form što is widely used in the Sirinić vernacular as a conjunction in relative clauses points to its provenance in a wider Serbian-Macedonian area as well as to its not being included in the standard Serbian language, in lieu of which the form koji is predominantly used. In the vernacular of Sirinić county, the lexeme što is used as a conjunction in declarative object clauses, and it is also the principal conjunction in the clauses of reason.

Keywords

• vernacular of sirinić county
• semantic and syntactic derivatives of the pronoun što
• the slavic-balkan area